Jim Miller on Politics

Pseudo-Random Thoughts

Barack Obama Is Not Much Of A Diplomat: So says Politico's
Carrie Brown (though not in
those exact words).

More than two years into his term, Obama cuts the image of an all-business envoy, seldom going
outside normal business hours to turn on the charm with other heads of state. He appears to
have built few deep personal bonds with foreign leaders, and his forays into public
diplomacy — a burger run last year with Russia's Dmitry Medvedev and a game of Ping-Pong
last month with Britain's David Cameron — are notable for their rarity.

Bush, by contrast, bonded with Britain's Tony Blair at Camp David, took Japan's Junichiro Koizumi
on a tour of Graceland, strolled hand-in-hand with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah at the president's
Texas ranch, looked into the eyes of Russia's Vladimir Putin during another ranch summit to
"get a sense of his soul," and visited the family hacienda of Mexico's Vicente Fox to pay respects
to his mother.

Put bluntly, Obama hasn't taken the time to make friends with many foreign leaders, even leaders
who could help the United States, in many ways.

Two exceptions — according to the White House — are significant.

Asked about Obama's friends abroad, administration officials point first to Medvedev, a fellow lawyer
and technology geek who spent hours with Obama negotiating the new START agreement, which
required repeated interventions by the two leaders. White House aides said the relationship
paid off during the debate over a United Nations resolution to authorize the use of force in Libya.
Russia didn't support it, but the country also didn't veto it.
. . .
There's Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan — an unlikely ally whom the
administration highlighted, saying they "seem to respect and admire one another."

Obama has spoken or met with Erdogan about 15 times, more often than with Sarkozy or Merkel,
at least according to official White House releases, which do not cover every contact between the
president and foreign leaders.

Neither of those two nations have been notable for their friendship toward the United States, in
recent years.

(As something of a technology geek myself, I doubt very much that Obama is really a "technology
geek".)

[Falls Church is] No. 1, but it isn't alone. In fact, four of the top ten richest counties in the
nation are concentrated in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, and a fifth, Howard County,
Md., is equidistant between Washington and Baltimore.

In recent decades northern Virginia has become an economic dynamo, driven by a private sector
that feasts on government contracting. These counties are also home to corporate lobbyists,
lawyers and consultants who work in or around the nation's capital, soaking up federal
government spending. And government-related hiring manages to keep the unemployment rate
in places like Falls Church City down to 5.7%.

(Number six on their list is Los Alamos, in New Mexico, which may also benefit from federal
dollars.)

No doubt many of those in these areas, even many who are working for the government, directly and
indirectly, are productive, are creating ideas and products that the the nation needs. No doubt
some others are engaged in lobbying that prevents the government from doing really stupid and
destructive things.

That said, the wealthy people in these counties must include many who are not economic dynamos, but
economic vampire bats. They are
wealthy because they have captured some of the billions that flow from taxpayers through our nation's
capital, without providing worthwhile goods or services.

(For the record: This failure to rein in our "beltway bandits", as they are often described in
Washington, is bipartisan.)

Glenn Kessler Thinks That Obama's Defense Of The Auto Industry
Bailout is
deceptive.

We take no view on whether the administration's efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were
a good or bad thing; that's a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But
we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case.

What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short
presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry
needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.

(Emphasis added.)

Read the whole thing for discussions of some of the tricks Obama used in his speech.

"Mutual Annoyance" As Chancellor Merkel visits Washington and
receives the Medal of Freedom, the view from Germany — assuming Der Spiegel is
representative of German opinion — is
sour.

Obama and Merkel have not established a close personal bond, but that's not the only problem.
When it comes to important issues, Germany and the United States have never stood
farther apart during Merkel's two terms as chancellor as they are at the moment. Merkel's
reputation in Washington has been hurt by Germany's decision to phase out nuclear power
by 2022, Berlin's abstention in a United Nations Security Council vote on imposing a "no-fly" zone
in Libya and the country's economic and financial policies.

Looking at things from the opposite perspective, Obama's standing has also taken a hit in German
government circles. In the Chancellery, he is viewed as a president who fails to deliver on
lofty pronouncements. Indeed, Merkel does not have faith that he can solve the world's
problems. The greatest thing the two governments have in common is their mutual annoyance.

In contrast, the
Associated Press thinks that
relationships between the two nations, and their leaders, are good, and, if anything, improving.

Obama said Merkel's visit reaffirmed the "indispensable" bond between the U.S. and
Germany.

"Germany, at the heart of Europe, is one of our strongest allies," Obama said. "And
Chancellor Merkel is one of my closest global partners."

Merkel noted that Obama, as a candidate for the White House, spoke to more than 200,000 people
in Berlin and proclaimed that America has no better partner than Europe. "Now it's my
turn," Merkel said. "Europe and Germany have no better partner than America."

Merkel's visit is her sixth trip to the United States since Obama took office. The relationship
between the two leaders is cordial but not close.

(Just for fun, compare the Obama-Merkel pictures the two news organizations used to illustrate their
articles.)

Which account is closer to the truth? Probably Der Spiegel's.

So what's the point of the visit? Most likely, both are looking for political gains, Obama by
getting some economic help from Germany, Merkel by getting the reception from Obama, who is
still quite popular in Germany. Most likely, both will be disappointed.

(Oh, I know, the court is supposed to assume that Dominique Strauss-Khan is innocent until proven
guilty, but given the evidence — and his past behavior — we are justified in assuming
that he is guilty until proven innocent.)

Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York said today he has engaged in "several inappropriate" electronic
relationships with six women over three years, and that he publicly lied about a photo of himself
sent over Twitter to a college student in Seattle over a week ago.

"I take full responsibility for my actions," Weiner said. "The picture was of me, and I sent it."

(And if you read the whole story, you'll see that there is probably more, perhaps much more.)

If I may insert a political point, this helps explain why House Democrats were unwilling to
pass a budget in the last session. Some of them were spending their time on other
pursuits. (Pathetic pursuits in Anthony Weiner's case.)

It will be interesting — and instructive — to see how many people who attacked
Andrew Breitbart apologize to him.

(What I've seen from Breitbart so far makes me think that it would be unwise to bet against him,
unless you have inside knowledge. And he has shown considerable cleverness in the way
he releases his stories a piece at a time, giving his opponents a chance to hang themselves.)

I have never met Paul Mayhew-Archer, but I have attended lots of dinner parties with BBC executives
like him. I don't mind the anti-royal sneers that come out with the first glass of pinot grigio,
the dogmatic secularism, or the tireless Tory-bashing that is the main course. I don't even
mind the hypocrisy that allows the host to champion his children's state-school education while
their private tutor sneaks upstairs.

What does make me cringe, though, is the barrage of four-letter words traded across the
table. Casual blasphemy, the F-word, the C-word: nothing is beyond the pale at these
gatherings. These men and women are stuck in the days of self-conscious student journalism,
when a cover featuring the vice-chancellor on the lavatory was seen as daringly subversive.
In their eyes, being prudish about words or mores smacks of conservatism - a truly
dirty word in the BBC lexicon.

I wasn't surprised, therefore, to learn that Mr Mayhew-Archer, then commissioning editor for
Radio 4 comedy, had cleared for use a joke involving a word that in my youth was referred to only
obliquely as "see you next Tuesday". I wasn't shocked when he said most listeners to The
News Quiz would "delight" in it. And I didn't raise an eyebrow when I heard the context: a
foul-mouthed swipe at the Conservative Party. In Mr Mayhew-Archer's world, this kind of thing
happens all the time.

This habitual crudity undoubtedly affects the way these "journalists", and their American counterparts,
think about the world. If we routinely refer to our political opponents with vulgar terms, we
are less likely to ever listen to anything they have to say.

(If you are curious, here's an
account
of the incident. Mr. Mayhew-Archer and I have different tastes in jokes, as well as different
standards.)

The House of Representatives sent the Obama administration a strong, bipartisan rebuke on Friday
for failing to make the case for war in Libya or seeking congressional authorization for military
action. It is critical that the administration understand the significance of this vote, abandon
its plans for a nonbinding resolution in the Senate and proceed to seek the requisite debate and
authorization for the use of military force, as I have advocated for nearly three months.

The White House called the vote "unnecessary and unhelpful," but it has only itself to blame.
The administration faces bipartisan opposition in Congress because it has, for more than two months,
sidestepped the clear constitutional and legislative intent that a president obtain congressional
authorization to go to war.

(Emphasis added.)

If you read the whole thing, you'll see that Lugar is trying hard to help the Obama administration get
out of the hole they have dug for themselves. They ought to accept his advice
and get right with the Constitution, and the War Powers Resolution.

(Presidents commonly believe the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional, though it has never been
tested at the Supreme Court. As I understand law professor Glenn Reynolds (better-known as
the Instapundit), the actual war-making powers of presidents have expanded because a series of
Congresses have refused to reign in a series of presidents.

Why on earth are British taxpayers being forced to fund European Union lobbying for policy campaigns
in the United States? Furthermore, why is the EU directly interfering in domestic political
debates in America, and so far without Congressional oversight? As the research detailed below
demonstrates, the EU's European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) is spending
millions of Euros on US-based campaigns against the death penalty. An extraordinary
development.
. . .
MPs reading this should be asking questions why British taxpayers' money is being used by the
European Union to fund campaigns against the death penalty in the United States, without the consent
of the British people. (Not least when 51 per cent of the British public support the reintroduction
of capital punishment for murder, with just 37 per cent opposing it, in a recent YouGov poll.)

This is also an extraordinary intervention in a highly charged, intensely political domestic debate in
the United States over the death penalty, the use of which has been ruled Constitutional by the
US Supreme Court on several occasions, and is backed by 64 percent of Americans according to
Gallup, with just 29 percent opposing. Can you imagine the outcry in Brussels if the US government
funded policy groups in the EU, and the charges of "American imperialism" that would inevitably
follow?

The EU Human Rights Fund is intended to help promote Western values in the developing
world. But a shock report has found at least £17million of cash — around £2million from
British taxpayers' — has been ploughed into promoting the pet causes of Eurocrats in
the U.S.

It is being spent on promoting abolition of the death penalty, discussion of climate change, green
energy, and the International Criminal Court — all controversial subjects in the U.S.

I skimmed through the report
and can say that some of the expenditures do not trouble me. If, for instance, the EU
subsidizes American research on zebrafish, that's fine with me. Other expenditures in the report
may or may not be dubious, depending on what the money actually bought. But many of them
are clear interference in American politics

Perhaps the most troubling are the payments to unnamed individuals, and to "Confidential"
recipients.

McNamara thinks that Congress should investigate.

How any foreign entity is spending money inside the U.S. should be of concern to Americans and
their elected representatives on Capitol Hill. Congress has a duty to ensure that U.S. laws,
sovereignty, and interests are not being undermined from within. Congressional oversight is
needed to identify exactly how and where the EU is intervening inside the U.S.

Local German officials said Sunday that they had evidence that tainted domestic sprouts had caused
the deadly E. coli outbreak that has afflicted Germany and unnerved fresh-produce markets throughout
Europe, and they shut down the farm in the northern part of the country where the sprouts were
grown.

Gert Lindemann, the agriculture minister in the northern state of Lower Saxony, said in Hanover that
Germans should not eat sprouts until further notice, with definitive test results available
Monday. Mr. Lindemann said that the authorities could not yet rule out other possible sources
for the outbreak and urged Germans to continue avoiding tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce.

As I understand it, the sick are disproportionately young women, the very group, in my experience,
who are most likely to eat raw sprouts.

American experts were surprised by the announcement — but not for the reason you might
think.

Some experts in food-borne illnesses expressed surprise at Mr. Lindemann's announcement, not
because sprouts were an unlikely source of the deadly bacteria but for the opposite reason:
sprouts have long been associated with food-borne illness and are a food most commonly
suspected in this sort of outbreak. As such, the experts said, sprouts should have been
among the first foods scrutinized by investigators.

Here's something I didn't know: For years, the Food and Drug Administration has been
advising people with weak immune systems (very young children, the elderly, AIDS sufferers, and
others)
not to eat raw sprouts
for this very reason.

Sprouts are commonly contaminated when seeds come into contact with cow manure, so there is a
good chance that these German sprouts were "organic".

Finally, something you should know: Some scientists believe that ordinary washing, even very
careful washing, will not decontaminate
raw vegetables and sprouts because bacteria can hide inside plants.

(The BBC has a useful
Q&A; the
Telegraph starts its article with a
pretty diagram
of the bacteria's genetic code.)

The farm being investigated in the current German outbreak does not have any animals or use
fertiliser. It is likely, Pennington said, that beans were brought in from somewhere else for
sprouting.

"My guess is that, from seeing the cases we've had over the years, whatever happened on the
farm was almost irrelevant. It was really where they were getting their beans from and
where the beans had been grown — were they putting manure on the fields, all that kind
of thing.

Pennington says that you should treat raw sprouts like raw oysters. Eat them if you like
them, but understand the risks involved.

Did John Edwards Break Campaign Finance Laws? Almost
certainly, since almost every major campaign does.

But that's probably not the question that interests most people. Most of us want to know
whether Edwards broke campaign finance laws by using money from "Bunny" Mellon to conceal his
affair with Rielle Hunter.

Richard Hasen, who is supposed to be an expert on campaign laws, says
maybe, maybe not.

But this is not a civil complaint. It's a criminal indictment. It's going to be tough to
prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Edwards was taking this money to save his campaign rather than
his marriage. (In the end, of course, neither survived.) Politico reports that the
prosecution has been looking around for former FEC commissioners to testify about how to interpret
the campaign-finance law, and at least one of these commissioners has turned the government
down, viewing the case as too murky.

If the law is so murky that the government needs an expert to testify as to what it actually means,
there's a decent argument that it would be unconstitutional to use that law as the basis for a
criminal prosecution. It is just too vague.

That leaves some of us, me for instance, in a quandary. Do we want the despicable John Edwards
or our "murky" campaign finance laws to lose?

If I have to choose, I suppose that I reluctantly pick the laws as my preferred loser. But I'll
keep hoping that there is some way that both can lose.

That PC Food Plate: The Department of Agriculture introduced
a new logo to, as Andrew Malcolm
says,
encourage us to eat less of what we like and more of what we don't like.

When I saw it, I cracked up because I could see that whoever designed it had traded clarity for
political correctness.

If that trade isn't obvious to you, here's the explanation: Look for the segment on the plate
that doesn't belong with the rest. Three of them, fruits, vegetables, and grains, are
traditional food groups, but the fourth, "protein" is a constituent of many foods.

It would be more logical to make the fourth "meat". Why didn't they? Because, I
suppose, they didn't want to offend vegetarians.

Unfortunately, that makes the diagram illogical because some grains (especially wheat) and some
vegetables (especially beans) have significant amounts of protein. (You could go the other
way and change the other segments to carbohydrates, et cetera, but that would just confuse many
people, especially people with lower levels of education.)

(When I look at earlier
logos, the
food pyramid and the "improved" food pyramid, I see devolution, with the second worse than the
first, and the new food plate worse than both.)

"The American people realize they've been robbed. They're just not sure by whom,"
write Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner in "Reckless Endangerment." But Americans
who read this outstanding history of the financial crisis will know, by the end, exactly who
created the meltdown of 2008 and how they did it. This is a story, the authors say, "of what
happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should
own a home."

"Disappointing", Perhaps Even Unexpected, though Catherine Rampell
doesn't use the second word, as she describes the latest
unemployment report.

After several months of strong job growth, hiring slowed sharply in May, raising concerns once again
about the underlying strength of the economic recovery.

The Labor Department reported on Friday that the United States added 54,000 nonfarm payroll jobs
last month, following an increase of 232,000 jobs in April. May's job gain was about a third
of what economists had been forecasting.

So some economists found those numbers "unexpected".

But perhaps they should have expected them. Click on the "Private" tab of the graphic to the
left of the article. That will give you a picture of the job market without the temporary
distortions of the 2010 census, and similar events.

When you click on the tab you will see that, though we have had 15 straight months of private job
growth, only four of those months showed strong growth, growth strong enough to make up for population
increases. Granted, 3 of those 4 months were in this year, but this year has also seen a sharp
rise in oil prices, which every economist should know will slow growth.

The NYT Deletes The Best Part: Yesterday, I learned from
James Taranto
that the new executive editor at the New York Times grew up thinking of the newspaper as
a religion.

It may be the most revealing quote ever published in the New York Times. It appears in a
story about the
New York Times, and its source is a top editor of the New York Times: Jill Abramson,
who will become the top editor of the New York Times in September, when Bill Keller steps down,
the New York Times reports:

Ms. Abramson said that as a born-and-raised New Yorker, she considered being named editor
of The Times to be like "ascending to Valhalla."

"In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion," she said. "If The Times
said it, it was the absolute truth."

Today, if you go to the
same story, you
find that those two fascinating paragraphs have been replaced by one dull paragraph:

Ms. Abramson, 57, said being named executive editor was "the honor of my life" and like "ascending
to Valhalla" for someone who read The Times as a young girl growing up in New York.
"We are held together by our passion for our work, our friendship and our deep belief in the mission
and indispensability of The Times," she said. "I look forward to working with all of you to
seize our future. In this thrilling and challenging transition, we will cross to safety together."

It's not an auspicious beginning for Ms. Abramson.

Whoever substituted that paragraph for the original two made the story far less interesting and gave
every critic of the Times another reason to distrust the newspaper.

And, of course, by trying to hide what she had said, they drew everyone's attention to it.

The New Yorker On Regulation: Today's New
Yorker cartoon shows two businessmen in an office. The man at the desk is saying to an
underling: "These new regulations will fundamentally change the way we get around
them."

That's funny (I think), because it's true; new regulations often just result in new ways
to evade them.

In general, I concluded long ago, those who devise regulations should keep them as simple and open
as possible. It should be easy for everyone to see what the regulations require — and
whether they are being obeyed.

That's especially true of destructive regulations. If a regulation is damaging something we
value, the economy, the environment, or whatever, we want everyone to know that as soon as
possible.

Three recent pieces of federal legislation,
Sarbanes-Oxley,
Dodd-Frank,
and ObamaCare violate that KISS principle
on a grand scale. It is almost as if those who wrote them wanted to provide new ways to
"get around" the regulations they impose, and wanted to make it almost impossible for outsiders to tell
whether the regulations are being obeyed.

(Of course, complex regulations often allow special interests, sometimes even single companies or
unions, to create advantages for themselves, but that's an old story that doesn't require much
repeating.)

Academically Adrift: I mentioned some of their findings in
January. Now Richard Arum and Josipa Roska
give their own summary in this
op-ed.

We recently tracked several thousand students as they moved through and graduated from a
diverse set of more than two dozen colleges and universities, and we found consistent evidence that
many students were not being appropriately challenged. In a typical semester, 50% of
students did not take a single course requiring more than 20 pages of writing, 32% did not have
any classes that required reading more than 40 pages per week, and 36% reported studying alone
five or fewer hours per week.

Not surprisingly, given such a widespread lack of academic rigor, about a third of students failed to
demonstrate significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing ability (as measured
by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) during their four years of college.

Imagine the outrage if the same were true of our grade schools, that one third of the students sat
there for four years — without learning anything. But for some reason, the same
result in our colleges and universities — at far higher costs per student, per year —
doesn't interest most journalists. (Or many parents, as far as I can tell.)

(Arum and Roska don't give the numbers in this op-ed, but if one-third of college students learn almost
nothing in four years, then it is likely that many other students, another third perhaps, don't learn
enough to justify the costs of their time in college.)

Arum and Roska do not spare our colleges and universities.

These real accomplishments do not, however, exonerate the colleges and universities that are
happy to collect annual tuition dollars but then fail to provide many students with a high-quality
education.

Or even a low-quality education, in all too many cases.

The students may not learn much, but most will acquire significant debts in those four years.

"The Boldest Undertaking Any President Has Undertaken On A Single Event
In Modern History" With all the bad economic news, it is natural for our comics to try
to cheer us up.

And I have to say that Vice President Biden succeeds admirably in
this speech,
where he mocks the exaggerated praise that President Obama has received for the bin Laden
raid.

It takes real comic talent to say those words, and keep a straight face. And using "undertaken"
right after "undertaking" shows a deft touch with words, by hinting that we are not supposed to take
what he says seriously. The timing, if not up to Jay Leno standards, was quite good,
too.

(Oddly, the audience did not seem to get the joke. I didn't check to see who they were.
Perhaps he was speaking to a workshop for the humor-impaired.)

For years, I have thought that Joe Biden was something of a joke. I had not
realized just how well he can tell jokes and have to admit that seeing him tell that one makes
him rise just a bit, in my estimation. (His boss, President Obama, is not very good at telling
jokes, and, I suspect, not very good at understanding them. I fear that if you were to tell him
the joke with the "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you" punch line, he wouldn't get
it — even after you explained it to him.)

- 8:49 AM, 2 June 2011

Historians ordinarily put the beginning of
modern history at about 1500 AD,
so Biden was including all American presidents in that claim. To be fair, journalists
often begin modern history at much later dates.

Do We Need A New 6 Stages List? Almost all engineers have
seen this list
(or some variant), showing the "typical" stages of a big project.

1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the Guilty
5. Punishment of the Innocent
6. Praise and Enthusiasm for the Uninvolved

Some engineers even post it on office walls, to remind themselves of likely hazards.

As I work my way through Morgenson and Rosner's
Reckless Endangerment,
I am beginning to think that we need a new list for the financial crisis, one that includes "Rewards for
the Guilty". Because, as the authors say, those who caused the breakdown have (mostly)
benefited from it. They haven't even gotten much public blame, much less fines or prison
time.

And many of them found jobs in the Obama administration.

(I don't mean to imply that the book is hard to read, just that its arguments are so important that I am
taking time to study them, and check them where I can, as I read through the book.)

Odd 2004 Election Fact: George W. Bush scored his best
gain over 2000 in
New York's 9th congressional district.
Bush won 30 percent of the vote there in 2000, but 44 percent in 2004. (The district is
partly in Brooklyn, partly in Queens, and the Brooklyn part tends Republican. For what it's
worth, Obama lost the Brooklyn part of the district in 2008, 57-42.)

There was a popular vote swing to Bush in the Northeast in the 2004 election, not big enough to
help him win any states, though he again came close in New Hampshire, but big enough to help him
with his popular vote majority.

(Why do I happen to be writing about this now? Because that's Anthony Weiner's district,
and I was looking him up in the 2010
Almanac of American Politics.)

- 2:57 PM, 1 June 2011

Josh Kraushaar thinks that the Republicans actually have a chance to
win the seat
if Weiner is forced out. I don't think that's likely — for one thing, I don't think he'll
resign — but I agree that a Republican win in New York 9th is possible, if he does resign.

You Won't Readthis
in a Tom Friedman column, but you need to know about it anyway.

Despite a huge police presence, protests continue in China's Inner Mongolia's provincial capital of
Hohhot as ethnic Mongolians vent their anger with Party cadres over environmental problems and
other issues. The unrest parallels similar incidents in Tibet in March 2008 and Xinjiang in
July 2009, but the phenomenon is hardly limited to minority areas. A Tsinghua University
sociologist estimated that across China there were 180,000 large-scale protests last year.

180,000 "large-scale" protests! China is a big country, but that's still a lot, especially
considering how much the protesters may be risking. (The editorial claims that China's
"security apparatus" has a bigger share of China's budget than its military.)

(As usual, you can read the
whole editorial
by using the Google search routine to access it. I don't know if that will stop being true at
some point.)

Subsidized Fossil Fuels: Sometimes, when I get discouraged
by our own government's policies, I am able to cheer myself up by looking at what other governments
do. Our government often behaves foolishly, but we have avoided some of the grand
mistakes made by other governments.

For example, the subsidies many petroleum producers give to
fossil fuels.
Although I knew about those subsidies, and the resulting low prices for gasoline, I had no idea
just how large they are, relative to the producers' economies. (The table is labeled
incorrectly; the subsidies include all fossil fuels, not just gasoline, or even just oil.)

The champion is Iran, which in 2009 was spending about 20 percent of its GDP on subsidies for fossil
fuels. (About $30 billion for oil, $25 billion for gas, and $11 billion for electricity production)
If the United States were to spend the same amount, relatively, we would have to use all
of our federal tax money for those subsidies — and borrow a trillion or so more just to cover the
costs. (I suppose that we can we can be glad that Iran is spending billions on these subsidies,
rather than spending even more money on nuclear weapons.)

But you could make a strong argument that Egypt, which in 2009 spent 9 percent of its GDP ($16 billion) on
similar subsidies, is behaving even more foolishly. Egypt produces about enough oil for its
own uses, and is a much poorer country than Iran.

In all of these countries, much of the subsidy goes, obviously, to people who own cars and trucks.
In most of them, those people are substantially better off than the average person in that country, so the
subsidy is regressive.

(If you are like me, you found those numbers hard to believe. You can check them at the
source.

What Do Top Federal Executives Think Of The Obama Administration? Not much.

A new survey shows strained relationships between senior career federal managers and executives
and the political appointees they work with.

In the survey, respondents rated Obama appointees lower than those in previous
administrations. Obama appointees earned a C average, or 2.0, compared with a 2.3 for those
in the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations. More than 30 percent gave Obama appointees
a D or an F for overall job performance, while only 20 percent awarded past appointees such low
marks.
. . .
Obama officials lack functional and agency-specific knowledge, according to survey
respondents. Nearly 60 percent of respondents gave Obama appointees a grade of C or lower
for their functional expertise, with less than 37 percent giving them A or B grades.
. . .
Appointees have "unbelievably poor communication with career employees," one respondent
commented. Almost 40 percent of managers gave appointees Ds or Fs on collaboration and
communication with their staffs.

(On the whole, one would expect most of these top civil servants to be Democrats, although the article
does not mention any party numbers. Most likely, the survey didn't ask about their party
affiliation, since that would be a sensitive question for these men and women.)

So these top civil servants think that Obama appointees don't know what they are doing, and are
poor listeners. Sounds familiar, somehow.

Congressman Anthony Weiner May Not Be Guilty, but he is certainly
acting guilty, as
even some leftists are beginning to admit.

We won't pretend to know the truth behind Weinergate — whether Weiner was the victim of a hacker
or prankster or conservative conspiracy, or whether he was personally responsible for sending a college girl
a photo of a man's bulge over Twitter. But what's clear is that Weiner is only inviting more suspicion
on himself by the way he's handling the attention. During an encounter with reporters earlier today, Weiner
refused to answer any questions about the incident, including whether that was his own package in the photo,
why he contacted a lawyer instead of law enforcement, and why he was following the college student on Twitter
in the first place. Instead, he pointed reporters to his previous statements (which don't actually address
those questions) and expressed his desire to move on to more important business.

Will he survive, politically? Lee Stranahan is probably right when he says it mostly depends on
his wife.

Only probably, because his district is one of the more Republican in New York City; McCain received 44 percent of
the vote there in 2008. And Weiner might be vulnerable to a primary challenger.

(Amusing bit of trivia from the 2010 Almanac of American Politics: "In 2007, he sponsored a bill creating
an on-line registry of sex offenders' e-mail addresses.")